Multiple reports went flying on Friday that Johnson, 40, had been tapped to write and direct Star Wars: Episode VIII, the second part of a new trilogy that begins with J.J. Abrams' Episode VII next year. (Depending on what movie site one reads, he might also be involved in the script for Episode IX, though getting Disney/Lucasfilm to confirm rumours is often like taking a bombing run on the Death Star -- without the help of the Force.)

Looper, which was directed by Rian Johnson and starred Bruce Willis and Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

Twitter hasn't even verified the guy yet. The thing is, though, Johnson is as bona fide as they come. With all of three movies and a few Breaking Bad episodes on his resume, he is the most exciting thing to happen to Star Wars since Imperial AT-ATs came traipsing across the planet Hoth in Empire Strikes Back. Really.

Let's assume, for the purposes of this article and the future of a franchise I've loved since I was five, that Johnson is in fact the dude who's doing Episode VIII.

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What this means is Disney and Lucasfilm are playing the Hollywood equivalent of fantasy football and putting together a wicked team. Not only do you have Abrams -- whose track record with Lost, Star Trek films and a zillion other projects speak for themselves -- but they went out and grabbed Josh Trank (Chronicle) and Gareth Edwards (Godzilla), two up-and-comers in sci-fi and all-around geek favorites, for their spin-off stand-alone movies.

Johnson is the blue-chip prospect, though. His original films have been exceptional -- most notably his 2005 debut Brick, a brilliant noir detective movie masquerading as a coming-of-age high school tale, and the 2012 film Looper, which deftly worked with the time-travel genre and didn't make your head explode in confusion.

He's a creative guy, and that's who you want heading up the second part of the new trilogy. It's the one that really defines where the whole thing is going, digs into the principals and sets up a climactic third act. There is a reason that Empire Strikes Back is the best movie of that first Star Wars trilogy, and it's not just because Han Solo ends up in carbonite at the end (though that helps).

Abrams is bringing back the old crew of Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill in Episode VII. Think the next two movies are going to center on Han, Leia and Luke? There's a better chance of Darth Maul joining a Jedi sewing circle.

This saga in all likelihood will revolve around the new kids -- John Boyega, Daisy Ridley, Domnhall Gleeson, et al -- and while Abrams sets it up, Johnson then takes over as the key guy crafting their stories and relationships.

Johnson creates worlds in his movies, from the quirky landscape of con men in 2009's The Brothers Bloom to the dystopian Kansas of Looper. Yet he also plays well in other people's sandboxes. Two of his three Breaking Bad episodes were instant classics: the intimate character study Fly between Bryan Cranston's Walt and Aaron Paul's Jesse that took place all in their meth lab, and the universally acclaimed Ozymandias, which even Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan said was the best of the series.

I talked with Johnson two years ago before the opening of Looper, and he struck me as a unassuming guy who cared an awful lot about storytelling and just sci-fi in general. (He also loves Back to the Future, so bonus points there.)

But, in dealing with things like time travel and genre elements in movies, he's also steadfast in making stuff watchable.

"There are so many different avenues you can end up going down and explaining, and then suddenly your movie is full of all this exposition that no one cares about," Johnson said.

In other words: Star Wars geeks will love his stuff as much as the normal everyday men and women who don't regularly obsess about lightsabers, TIE Fighters and perfecting one's Chewbacca growl.

Johnson told me that a lot of his writing process comes down to engineering. "It is like building a bridge where it's something that hopefully is invisible to the audience. The audience is just riding this movie moment to moment, just like a car driving across the bridge is not aware of every strut underneath them that's keeping them up in the air."

Throw all that into a fan-favorite space opera with the Millennium Falcon and starships whizzing around? Well, strap in for one heck of a ride because everyone's going to know Rian Johnson's name by the end of it.